The Croquet Project: Open-Source P2P 3-D Platform

paulie, two things..

1) how did i miss that thread?!?

2) exactly. that's pretty much what i was just talking about right before your post. as a matter of fact, i think i remember a couple threads about that very subject and how it could be done. albeit, the thread you provided was a succint explanation thereof.

Suzanne, I renamed it to c:\Jasmine\

So the shortcut points to the right file.

You mean you didn't compile it yourself? For shame.

Oh come on. You just aren't getting with the "open source spirit". Open source is *about* cryptic instructions, prereqs, convolution, obfuscation, lack of documentation and jokes about /dev/null!

If it wasn't intentionally hard to use, then how would linux evangelists maintain their air of superiority? They'd have to resort to making 'clever' misspellings like "windoze" and replacing S's with dollar signs!

But hey, at least it's free, as in beer.

oh it's complicated enough without having to compile it.

which, actually, you do a lot of when you update it.

I just think that a lot of these OSS projects need to get over themselves before they can be mainstream. Until then, Croquet will remain alluring to... the people who wrote it. And maybe some people who still read Slashdot.

"You mean you didn't compile it yourself? For shame."

I would have compiled it but some of the toggle switches on my machine have been a bit ornery lately and the humidity here tends to make the keypunch cards stick together at times. I will confess though, I usually use a program to do the compilation, but for maximally efficient code nothing beats converting it to hand written assembly.

"Oh come on. You just aren't getting with the "open source spirit". Open source is *about* cryptic instructions, prereqs, convolution, obfuscation, lack of documentation and jokes about /dev/null."

You must be confused. Second Life is not open sourced.

heh heh, well much the same thing can be said about SL.

right now it's alluring to well, to the content creators and the people from slashdot.

Julian is a great speaker. The presentation was cool. But is it only me who had an impression of deja-vu of the ideas presented (CSCW research stuff)? Disscussion about future applications is something most humans can do quite well. I have not watched the whole presentation but kept on waiting for more information regarding the promised 'paradigmatic' shifts at the architectural level (feeling too sleepy lol). I think they have deliberately avoided mentioning SL, why? I certainly feel that the architecture must have some ground breaking elements and focusing on these would have been very interesting. But then looking at some of the questions, the presentation must have been appropriate for the audience. But it really p**** me off they did not mention once SL.

well, right now, I'm lovin' SL that's all I can say.


There have been a couple of things I like about croquet so far though:

1. the pointer is cool
2. shared applications (external applications reflected in world)
3. I like the fact that I can draw in world and it gets reflected

These are neat ideas. One wonders why SL hasn't done them

Hmm... think about this...Philip could have given a presentation and show a browser on a prim. And then add "oh yeah, you could... COULD have a word application too, you COULD have an Visual Programming Environment, well you COULD have C# fired up on a prim, you know what I mean..." I think it's evident that SL developers must be having the same ideas, but realizing each idea takes time. At this time SL is leading the race(unless Croquet's archicture which I know nothing about... is ground breaking).

Well, in Croquet's case COULD really mean you click a few times and it happens now; not sometimes in the future, maybe.

An they have the whole Squeak environment at their disposal, that means prebuilt HTML browser, email client, IRC client, RSS browser, music sequencer, a quite advanced development environment (code refactoring was invented in the Smalltalk world, you know), etc.



Well, it's quite a different world from SL. What about being able to change the code of Croquet at any time while you are in-world and see the changes immediately? No restriction. You can change the behaviour of objects, but also the physics of the world down to the 3D shading algorythms. You can change EVERYTHING, Croquet is written in Smalltalk and Smalltalk is written in itself and can change dynamically at runtime.

On the other side, LL has made a lot of work to make SL usable for non-developers. I don't think that Croquet is good enough for non-technical people yet.

P2P, I'm a little skeptical about. What about security? What about the bandwith, all sorts of questions.

Have to admit though its very exciting technology to watch. It seems some people might be a step ahead using open source.

If you want to look at Squeak, go here...

- Jon

I like this.

And I'd be way ahead of you, SuezanneC, except that somebody named Gates seems to have walked off with my CP/M.

That would be in contrast with?

Hmm... Kitten,
I suspect there must be some (Aspect Oriented Programming) AOP aspects to the underlying Croquet architecture. Changing classes in real time and so on and so forth... My point was precisely focused at my annoyance resulting from Croquet developers for not acknowledging the contributions of others especially looking at the examples that were presented (just look at dozens of doctoral dissertations on collaborative operating systems, systems desinged to be user tailored at various level of the underlying architure, systems with inbuilt awareness support and the HUGE body of social research looking at collaborative aspects of interactions with such environments, the ideas about non-euclidean spaces, recursive worlds etc... I could go on). I think I wont try to define what COULD means, would feel a bit like Clinton trying to define what IS is.
MG

Moved to Off-Topic.

I got it to work for a few moments. It's not what I would call intuative and there are no other people in it.

There's "technology" then there's the "world and community".

No, it's not intuitive at all.

I remembered everything in the cool demos, then loaded up the application for myself.
I didn't see any of that cool stuff straight off.

I managed to get a plywood box up, but that's about it.

This is a nice line.

What he said.

Well, it hasn't evolved to that state where it is user-friendly and there are sufficient 'amenities', if you will, to sustain a community other than the hardcore development bunch. Though, for a time being they are sufficient and in fact wholly necessary for its growth. My hope is on Croquet's ability to integrate real-world apps and on it's p2p architecture.

Yep, but AOP derived its basic ideas from Smalltalk and Self and not the other way around.



Oh, got the point now: I haven't seen the presentation yet. I was commenting on the ability of Croquet as a software platform compated to SL as a software platform.

By the way, Croquet came up at a Thinkers' meeting a few weeks ago and my comment was: Croquet is focusing on the software platform, SL is focusing on the community. But others in this thread posed it much better.